Disaster Intelligence: Information to Connect and Epower Governments, NGOs, and Citizens

In this manuscript I present a model of disaster intelligence as an aspirational model for emergency and disaster management in Western contexts. I reinforce this conceptualization of disaster intelligence with a heuristic for all-hazards disaster communications, in which traditional/local and social media forms of disaster communications are seen as supplements to official disaster communications. I advocate for enhancing our disaster data capabilities by automating the processing of social media disaster data that are not presently being fully exploited. I next apply Hilhorst’s (2004) social domains heuristic as a way of representing the competing interests and understanding of disaster science and management, disaster governance, and local participants and vulnerable populations, respectively. I then offer a series of empirical incidents of disaster communication failure that we can see as representing breakdowns among competing perspectives from the three social domains. I conclude with recommendations for practice and scholarship as ways to advance disaster communication and disaster intelligence capabilities in both Western and developing contexts. Western practitioners and scholars have advanced an increasingly coherent body of knowledge and practices for emergency and disaster management. One noteworthy juncture in that development was the creation of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) under President Jimmy Carter in 1979 (FEMA, 2010). The new agency had been directed to create diverse multi-agency and multi-level partnerships and responsibilities; following this directive, FEMA’s leaders created a “rational system of management called the Integrated Emergency Management System (IEMS)” (Giuffrida, 1985, p. 2) that employed what is now the well-known four phase model of emergency management activities (see Figure 1, below).2 By the mid-1980s the four phases were common parlance in American academic and practice communities. In support of this point, it is noteworthy that a special issue of Public Administration Review in 1985 contained 22 articles dedicated to emergency and disaster management, and the four phase model is employed broadly throughout those articles.